The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  He drove a taxi in those days, one of those khatara black and yellow Fiats. I remember the bench seat in front had collapsed and there were deep depressions where the springs had caved in. He told me to sit in the back but I refused. I wasn’t going to lord it over the back seat like a paying customer. I wanted to sit in front with the driver. Solidarity among the working classes, yaar! Doss started the engine and a couple came to the window and asked if he would drop them to Dongri, an older couple with a suitcase. He flagged the meter and we set off with Hindi movie music playing on the radio. There was a robotic voice saying the words, disco crazy, uh-huh, uh-huh. He smoked beedis and drove badly, a terrible driver, the kind who made you fear for your life and the lives of anybody who had the misfortune to be on the road at the same time. He drove and smoked and hummed along with the disco tune. Also he managed to provide a running commentary on the state of the roads and he gave us a brief lecture about luck. He said it was luck that we were all going in the same direction. Not that he would have refused to take the couple but this way no one was inconvenienced. Luck was preferable to coincidence, said Doss, because with luck you felt as if you were blessed, whereas coincidence was random happenstance. There was no blessing involved. The old man in the back said he preferred coincidence. At least coincidence could not be evil. At this his wife laughed. You’re so wrong, she said, coincidence and luck are the exact same thing. In the same way that there was bad luck and good luck there was bad coincidence and good coincidence. This was an example of good coincidence and it was entirely possible that good could turn bad, for example if the taxi got into an accident. When she said the word ‘accident’ she stopped speaking, as if she was afraid she had jinxed the ride. We had now begun to enter the innards of the city, the neighbourhoods most Bombayites avoid. We passed the station and a wide avenue with covered pavements and then the passengers asked him to stop. Doss said he was sorry if his driving had worried the lady. He knew he was not a good driver but it was the only work he could get. It bothered him sometimes, he said. If he was being honest it bothered him a lot. It drove him crazy that he drove badly and had to drive for a living. By now the couple were anxious to be on their way. The old lady said, beta, never mind, at least you got us here in one piece. She even gave him a tip.

  From there it was a short drive to the heart of the red-light district, Kamathipura 11th Lane. He parked near one of the numbered brothels and didn’t bother locking the cab. From the moment we got out of the busted Fiat and all the way to his door, which was on the second floor of a residential chawl, people stopped him to talk. A boy asked if he could keep the Ambedkar book he had borrowed for a little longer. Yes, said Doss, but he wanted it back sooner not later. A man asked to borrow money, a guy who smelled as if he’d spent his last penny on hooch, and country hooch at that. Doss gave him some notes and they had a short conversation about the stock market, of all things. Then there was a woman who wanted to show him a prescription for antibiotics. Her daughter was down with something and Doss had told her which doctor to see. It went on like this, all kinds of people stopping to exchange a few words about everyday matters. The pimps and pickpockets wanted just to greet him or be greeted by him. After a while I began to see him as a kind of local politician, corrupt and popular at the same time. Don’t get me wrong. Woh kavi tha. That much I’ll say about Narayan and Xavier, they were poets through and through. Unlike some of the others of their generation at least they didn’t change their poetry to suit whichever wing of the communist party was currently in vogue.

  I stood there listening to these banal and moving exchanges and thinking about the unlikely connection between Narayan and Xavier when the strangest thing happened. I noticed a figure coming toward us through the dust and cookfires. A figure all in black, black kurta, black jeans, a black sling bag, black hair down to his shoulders, and for a moment I thought Doss was in two places at once because it looked so much like him. Somebody said, aa gaya, chanduli aa gaya. I thought, yes, this man could very well be a chanduli, he had that air of boredom, the stone-faced boredom of the opium smoker. Narayan and the chanduli shook hands and it was like seeing mirror images touch each other, two long-haired fellows in black shaking hands on a street crowded with every kind of humanity except the law-abiding. The chanduli was introduced as Newton Xavier and then it all made sense to me. I knew who he was, the poet who’d given up London and Paris and returned to Bombay, the poet who had given up poetry. And now I knew why: he had become a chanduli.

  When Narayan managed to shake free of his constituents we went upstairs to his living quarters. It was nothing more than a single room, although I’m sure there wasn’t another like it in the district. A mattress on the floor that served also as a workspace, and an entire wall covered with books of poetry and fiction in Hindi and Marathi and English. I picked out a few volumes by poets who were familiar to me and found they had all been signed by the authors. I wondered what Doss’s visitors thought of those books, the pimps and prostitutes and criminals who came to see him, what did they think of the books that lined the wall? The whole Clearing House backlist was present and accounted for but also preserved were obscure Writers Workshop and Mouj and Newground and Praxis and Pras Prakashan titles by vanished authors. And then it struck me, the most notable thing of all on a day of notable things. The shelves were custom made and the collection had been arranged alphabetically according to genre and language. A meticulous arrangement! You would never connect such organisation with such a poet, an outcaste legend of the red-light district. And as you stood there looking at the books your view also took in the facing buildings with the saris and blouses hung out to dry on the balconies. And there were the women hanging out of the sills, smoking and laughing and beckoning to you and shouting jokes to Narayan and Xavier who had returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Solan No. 1 and ice. We drank out of chai glasses and we toasted the women of the numbered brothels, who toasted us too. After the second drink and before the third and fourth and fifth, Xavier went to the shelves and retrieved a slim book of poems. It was my own lost volume from a lifetime earlier, a book they presented to me with a ceremonial flourish, and Narayan produced from the pocket of his khaki cabbie’s jacket a Parker ballpoint and they said, maestro, please, your signature.

  I’m an old man and I’m entitled to my peeves. The writers of today are as conservative as novelists or bankers. Terminal affability. Addiction to approval. What will Auntie think? What will the neighbours think? This is the neurosis of the middle-class Indian. But for a moment there we cared less about the relatives and the neighbours. We were devotees of anarchy and marijuana. We made our rhymes to a soundtrack of R. D. Burman, Waterfront, Ji Whiz, Human Bondage, Synthetic Frost, Savage Encounter, The Voodoos, The People, Tryst, Bharat Mata Nach Kud Bajaa, Kosmic Junk, and the mother mushroom of a hundred psychedelic Indias, Atomic Forest. Why has no one made a movie about that time, or a play, or book? We live in the moment. We have no talent for history and we are unable to adapt to modernity. This is the true reason. And I’ll tell you one last thing. If a nation does not care for its past it does not care for its future; and if it does not care for its poets it does not care for anything at all.

  Subir Sonalkar, journalist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Gokul Permit Room, Colaba, Bombay, July 1998

  I believe the Bombay poets had a knack for cruelty. And if they didn’t they developed it pretty fucking fast. They were masters of the number two trades, petit bourgeois petty criminals, habitual drunkards and fornicators, lone wolves and seers, desperados to a man, and they were all men except for the formidable Ms de Souza who had a kind of honorary status in the boy’s club. It was a club, no question about it, women not welcome, nobody welcome except the six or seven founder members who appointed themselves dictators for life and locked the door behind them.

  Do you know the London-returned boy with the long hair, the architect who gave it all up to write poems? Yes, well done, Adil Jussawalla. Do you know his second publ
ication, which was not a collection but a single book-length poem, a clenched fist or raised middle finger in the face of Indian poetry? Do you remember the title? Of course you don’t. Missing Person. In my opinion it is compulsory reading for anyone interested in the poets of Bombay. And never was there a more bitterly self-aware title, because that’s what they were, missing persons, every one of them. They took pride in not publishing and not writing. One book and then nothing for a decade, just disappear off the face of the earth. Hole up somewhere nobody knows you and drink yourself to the third bardo or the seventh circle. If you wanted to meet them you’d have to lurk on a street corner in Tardeo or New Marine Lines or Santa Cruz or Colaba. You’d have to lie in wait like an assassin at Saint Michael’s Church or Babulnath Mandir and they wouldn’t come, they’d never turn up, because they were missing fucking persons AWOL for all time, and what I want to know, what I’m dying to know is, what the fuck were they hiding from?

  I was a young poet in the eighties, age twenty-none and counting, which makes me not so old now, to address your great surprise. Well, watch and weep, my young friend, you age fast in the fucking po biz. For a young poet writing in Marathi and English it was a rare thing to find a poet you wanted to emulate. Plus, like all young poets I resisted the easy influence. I cherished the difficulty. And despite my wilful nature and my immense shyness, despite my youth and my arrogance, for there is nobody more arrogant than a young poet, despite my tremendous fucking handicap, I found two names worthy of the role of master, two names I hoped would consider me a worthy student. As luck would have it the masters I chose were drunken modernists, which says something about me. Perhaps I should have been less eager to approach them, perhaps it’s a better thing to let one’s heroes remain on the page, perhaps, as Ms de Souza says, it is “Best to meet in poems”.

  The first master I approached at a play he had written or directed or acted in, or all of the above. I took a bus to the theatre in Matunga where it was playing and because I could not afford a ticket I loitered near the entrance and looked at the posters and then I went over to the café area. I helped myself to a glass of water and sat at a table. I was carrying a volume of Mallarmé’s selected poems in English and because I was young and hopeful it seemed the correct companion for me in my state of solitary and unintoxicated pennilessness. I read and sipped water and read some more and after a while a small crowd of people exited the theatre and stood around smoking and discussing the play. I saw Mr Oak sitting by himself at the farthest table and I gathered my Mallarmé and my courage and introduced myself. I was overjoyed when he asked me to take a seat. How naïve, how grateful is the young poet for the smallest gesture of kindness! We talked about the play, a Marathi adaptation of Ionesco, a comic adaptation that made much use of slapstick and a fellow in a rhinoceros suit, and then we talked about Brecht and Artaud and the sacred quest to eradicate the proscenium and make obsolete the division between audience and performer. There was a silence, a short silence, as occurs between people who are meeting for the first time and then Mr Oak got down to business. Would I lend him a few rupees, he said, and that was the amount he asked for, a few rupees. I was a goddamn student, a goddamn poet nursing my glass of water at the Matunga theatre café because that was all I could afford. I remember I had just enough money for the bus home. I had no lendable rupees. When I told him I was dry as a bone my master Mr Oak could not hide his disappointment. He sat completely still and stared at the ground. Minutes later he left on an errand, never to return.

  That was my experience with the first master. With the second I decided to be more circumspect. I had heard that Mr Kolatkar liked to hold court on Thursday evenings at a café opposite the Jehangir Art Gallery. I think it was called Woodside Inn or Wayside Inn, a restaurant and tea shop with a grandfather clock on the wall and checked red and white tablecloths. It was there that Mr Kolatkar took his customary table under the clock and entertained his many visitors. By then he was no longer drinking whisky. He preferred copious draughts of water and cups of strong tea. He lived in a small apartment crammed with books, so small that when he had a visitor they had to go to the balcony to sit and talk. Not that I was ever invited there. These are stories I heard from those who had been allowed to meet the great man, the great poet in his poetic abode.

  From my nondescript suburb it took more than an hour in a train to reach Churchgate. From the station I crossed the road to the Eros cinema and gazed for a moment at the building’s art deco silhouette and signage, a sight I had loved as a boy, and for a moment I wondered what Arun Kolatkar would make of it, such was my devotion to the idea of the poet Arun Kolatkar who worked as an art director in the hallowed world of advertising, the glamorous world of copywriting and marketing, who must have walked by the Eros cinema many times in his wanderings around the city, whose understanding of the sign’s art deco lineage was so much deeper than mine. What did he see when he looked at the Eros sign’s whimsical onomatopoeic curves and the bespoke orgasmic O with the dot at its centre? What were the poetic or prosaic or aphoristic thoughts that occurred to him? These were the questions that came to me as I stood on the broken sidewalk outside the cinema, the storied sidewalk broken by the roots of an immense banyan, roots that broke to the surface like a sea serpent’s limbs, and then I crossed the street to the Oval Maidan, where of course a cricket match was in progress. I stopped to watch the game that had just begun and I took careful note of the opening batsman’s stance, which was just a smidgen short of elegant. I watched the game for the space of an over, noting the paceman’s line and his persistent forays into the corridor of uncertainty. I noted the placement of the fielders and came to certain conclusions about the players, because I too had played cricket. After all, I had been born and brought up in Bombay, how could I not? And then I thought of Arun Kolatkar walking across the Oval Maidan and I wondered what images came to him as he watched a game of cricket and how those images would transpose into the playfully poignant yet meticulously crafted lines of verse associated with his legend, or the mysteriously apt covers he created for poetry books, or the powerful yet subtly dissenting art he made for the clients whose products he sold in his endlessly creative advertising life. From the Oval I walked to the Madame Cama Road and then I walked past the YWCA where my mother worked from time to time as a receptionist and I came at last to the Regal Cinema. I stopped to admire its art deco sign, not as famous as the Eros sign but a significant fact of city life nevertheless, and of course I thought about Arun Kolatkar and his poems about Bombay, specifically the poem set in a modest tea shop, and I thought about the way the poem used the demotic and I thought perhaps one day I too would write a poem with just such a quality of informed insouciance, a poem that did not care what you thought of it, an untouchable poem that didn’t seek your approval or understanding. I knew Arun Kolatkar had gazed at the same scene many a time and I wondered what thoughts would have passed through his distinguished head at the sight of the Regal’s not-quite-imposing art deco sign. Almost immediately I knew the answer. He would redesign the sign in his imagination and he would improve it. He would make it a subtly transcendent work of art and a homing beacon for the city’s movie-starved multitudes. From the Regal I went to the Jehangir Art Gallery, which was my favourite part of the walk because I passed Elphinstone College on my left and the Prince of Wales Museum on my right and I did what I always do when I pass the museum, I leaned in for a glimpse, which is what anyone who walks past it must do for it is one of the sweet sights of the city, the old white dome set in a formal arrangement of palm trees and framed by a cluster of smaller domes and pinnacles. For a boy like me, a poor poet from the city’s Marathi interiors, such a sight exalted the difficulty. These were the thoughts that occurred to me and I remember with some embarrassment that I even spoke my thoughts aloud. The difficulty, I said, exalt the difficulty! When I finally reached the Woodside or Wayside Inn I was drenched in sweat and my shirt clung to my back. It was a humid day as only the city of Bombay can
be humid. Rather than rush into the restaurant in my dishevelled state I waited on the pavement until I had cooled down a little and just when I had steeled myself to go in the door and introduce myself to the poet Arun Kolatkar, the great bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar, just then I saw him stepping out of the restaurant, the Wayside or Woodside Inn, what does it matter? He was alone. But there was a look in his eyes, his piercing eyes hidden under the bushy white eyebrows and long white hair, an eloquent look that I understood immediately. It said: I know you know who I am. I know you are a young writer and I know that you have read my work and admired it. I know too that you would like to come up and speak to me but I implore you, do not do it! It is not that I do not wish to speak to you in particular. The fact of the matter is that I do not wish to speak to anyone. I wish to take a small constitutional unmolested by the young and the importunate and I would be most grateful if you would allow me on my way. His eyes made this small speech and then he walked past me and of course I did not disturb the great man, for after all, who was I but a small, a meaningless speck on the vast page of poetry? He was a paragon, a Hector, a goddamn Samson, and I a mere Phoebe. I let him pass.